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Inside Star Trek issue 4: Klingon side-projects with Matt Jefferies and coloured food cubes with Irving Feinberg
Inside Star Trek was a semi-official newsletter, published under the guidance of Gene Roddenberry. This connection gave the writers access to the actors, production crew and sets.
I own the complete run:
Issues 1 to 12: Inside Star Trek, edited by Ruth Berman
Issues 13 to 24: renamed Star Trektennial News, edited by Susan Sackett
Issues 25 to 31: again called Inside Star Trek, edited by Virginia Yable
Here are highlights from issue 4, published October 1968.
The best issue so far, Inside Star Trek 4 gave readers inside information on two TOS production stars: art director Matt Jefferies and property master Irving Feinberg.
Dorothy Fontana interviewed Matt Jefferies, designer of the Enterprise, the shuttlecraft, the Klingon battle cruiser and most of what we saw on TOS.
Roddenberry and Jefferies, from the book Beyond the Clouds Walter Matt Jefferies started his Hollywood career with design work on military-themed productions. He told Fontana “I did ship interiors at MGM for The Wreck of the Mary Deare, World War II airplane stuff for Never So Few and The Bull Halsey Story” and then casually mentioned that he also worked on the original Ocean’s Eleven.
For most of his career to that point, he was a set designer, but on Star Trek, Mission: Impossible and April Savage, his title was art director. Fontana asked what an art director does:
I’m responsible for everything they photograph, except the people. It entails the initial design of sets, supervising the building, colors, painting, everything that’s on the stage or location, having it ready for the camera and within budget. It calls for working with the director, set decorator, carpenters, painters, special effects, the whole ball of wax.
Fontana asked him about creating planet sets, and how that differs from designing interiors.
The first thing I do is work out what has to happen in a proposed set… How many actors we have, what the moves are, what kind of general settings the script calls for, how to light it, how to get the equipment in and out, what the camera shots will be, the scope of the shots…you design the set around that.
The approach to interiors is the same as exteriors… In the early stages, John Dwyer, set decorator, comes in and looks at the initial drawings. Then he and I sit down and have a talk about what I have in mind. He proceeds to put his talents to work finding the proper dressing along the lines of what we’ve discussed. I depend on this man very heavily, not only to carry out my ideas but to come up with an endless fountain of his own ideas. And he does. For the most part, stage 9 [which houses almost all of the standing sets for the Enterprise] is a very static set, and John can turn that over to his assistant, Mike May. Then John has the opportunity of getting off the lot and searching for unusual things — something particular he has in mind, or some idea of mine. But John has the opportunity to get out and look where I don’t. So he’s my floating eyes and sticky fingers…that’s where all the ‘freebies’ come in too. He has a wonderful knack for finding these things.
See my coverage of issue 1 for Fontana’s interview with John Dwyer.
Fontana then asked about the Klingon battle cruiser and the Botany Bay, from Space Seed.
We had already established the essential character of the Klingons, so we really had more to draw on in the background than we originally had on the Enterprise. The Klingon character was different and clearly defined in several scripts. We tried to keep some of that character in the design of the ship — cold and, in a sense, vicious. We tried to get into it some of the qualities of a manta ray, shark, or bird of prey, because the Klingons follow that general feeling. Another requirement is that we had to get a feeling their ships were on par with the starships in equipment, power, size, etc. After many sketches and many evenings, it finally evolved. Everyone liked it, and that’s what we built. It was strictly an extra-curricular activity on my part.
The Botany Bay was actually designed before the Enterprise. It was a little idea that popped up and was labelled “antique space freighter.’ Later on, we made it look like something else — a vehicle out of the early 2000s.
The Jefferies drawings here are all from the wonderful people at TrekCore.
Creating limbo
The design of the frontier town in Spectre of the Gun, in which only the fronts and basic interiors of the buildings were represented, has often been characterized as a cost-saving idea, but this never made a lot of sense as the studio backlot surely had standing western sets the production could have used. Fontana credited this “limbo” design to Jefferies, and he characterized it as a thematic, rather than a budget, decision: “It wasn’t a true limbo — it was a stylized limbo only in what wasn’t there. When you say ‘stylized limbo’ you usually mean misbalanced proportions, things hanging in space, etc. What was there was real. It looked different and it worked effectively.”
Jefferies said that the most challenging sets to that point had been for What Are Little Girls Made Of? and Amok Time, while the most successful were for A Taste of Armageddon, The Return of the Archons, and The Squire of Gothos. His favorite set at the time was “the temple and oracle room in a show we’re shooting (now), For The World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky.”
Asked about the most difficult aspect of the job, “Matt had a ready answer for that one: Compromise.”
Usually what we wind up with is only a small part of what I would like to see. But you have to give with the material you have available, the capabilities of the people working for you, time, money — bend for the lighting man, bend of the cameraman, for the director. The most difficult thing is to come up with something you visualized that is on budget and will work best for the company. Frequently, when we get up there to shoot, there’s not a lot left of the original concept.”
Jefferies’ elaborate shuttle design 
What he had to settle for 
Jefferies’ decompression chamber 
The chamber in Space Seed Feinberg’s tribble-ations
Irving Feinberg proved that Deep Space Nine did not invent the name of its tribbles tribute episode; the article he wrote in this issue was called Trials and Tribble-ations of a Master of Properties.
Feinberg defined his job as managing properties, “any object in the show that works, i.e. is handled, used, or moved by an actor. It may be as big as a boulder or as small as a pin. For each episode I must first read the script for the story content, and then break it down, checking it for all of the props that are to be used. These props must be available by the first day of shooting.
He goes on to describe his tribble travails:
I had about 1,000 tribbles made in four different sizes and four different colors. Some of them were fitted with balloons which could be inflated to make the tribbles pulsate. Others contained motors which moved them about. In one sequence, when I had just finished piling hundreds of tribbles around the set and attaching numerous others to the walls, William Shatner came up to me and with a perfectly straight face told me that they would all have to be removed so that the walls could be repainted. Just before I started to climb those same walls, the whole cast and crew exploded in one grand guffaw.
Food cubes of the future
Feinberg also provided a short-hand Enterprise cookbook:
While on these distant planets, our actors are served with exotic food and drink. I use cubed apples, celery, or other fruits and vegetables dyed bright blue, green, or purple with harmless vegetable dye. I use the vegetable dye because they must not only look strange, but they must be edible. In one scene I had to have a blue drink. I thought I had found the answer to both the color and palatability when I discovered blue curacao. The director swore that I was making William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy tipsy with my liqueur, so, much to their disgust, I had to go back to my trusty (but not tasty) blue dye in water.
Feinberg’s props, like Uhura’s earpiece, were called feinbergers on set It’s gratifying to read that Feinberg really liked his job: “I take pride in my work and in Star Trek. I want each episode to be artistically and scientifically logical. Being the property master on Star Trek may challenge my ingenuity and send me home talking to myself, but I am pleased to be associated with all of the artists on it and proud of the finished product.”
Inside Star Trek is an invaluable source of early Star Trek voices. I’ll cover each issue.
A Taste of Armageddon, Botany Bay, DC Fontana, For The World is Holow and I Have Touched the Sky, Inside Star Trek, Inside Star Trek newsletter, Irving Feinberg, John Dwyer, Klingon, Matt Jefferies, Spectre of the Gun, Star Trek, The Return of the Archons, The Squire of Gothos, What Are Little Girls Made Of? -
Inside Star Trek issue 3: DeForest Kelley on television stress and McCoy’s secret pain
Inside Star Trek was a semi-official newsletter, published under the guidance of Gene Roddenberry. This connection gave the writers access to the actors, production crew and sets.
I own the complete run:
Issues 1 to 12: Inside Star Trek, edited by Ruth Berman
Issues 13 to 24: renamed Star Trektennial News, edited by Susan Sackett
Issues 25 to 31: again called Inside Star Trek, edited by Virginia Yable
Here are highlights from issue 3, published September 1968.
Issue 3 delivered a good interview with DeForest Kelley, but otherwise it’s light on content, with no other articles.
The daughter we never met
Editor Ruth Berman caught Kelley during a break in shooting The Empath. The character had just been tortured, and the two walked to Kelley’s dressing room with “McCoy’s rags fluttering around him.”
From TrekCore Berman asked him to describe McCoy and, just coming off that emotional scene, the actor struggled a little. “I know what McCoy is in my mind [but] right now it seems kind of hazy to me…I guess because I just got through doing a scene down there.” He then added:
I picture him as a dedicated physician, who came aboard for some reason that hasn’t been explained quite clearly…perhaps from some deep hurt in his background.
Kelley’s idea that McCoy fled a personal tragedy had been kicking around behind the scenes for a while. This interview took place in the late summer of 1968. A memo from Dorothy Fontana, dated January 1967, pitched Gene Roddenberry on the idea:
Dear Gene:
I came up with the following premise after a conversation with DeForest Kelley on January 4…
Teaser: The U.S.S Enterprise stops over at a Star Base to pick up new medical personnel being transferred to duty aboard. As the group of doctors and nurses beams aboard, McCoy and Kirk greet them in the Transporter Room. One of the women, a lovely dark-haired girl of twenty, takes one look at McCoy and flings herself into his arms. Much to Captain Kirk’s surprise. Then McCoy turns to Kirk, grinning, and introduces Nurse Joanna McCoy…his daughter.
The heart of the story concerns Captain Kirk, Dr. McCoy, and Joanna. We will learn McCoy had been married a long time ago, but it turned sour and ended in divorce despite the birth of the child, Joanna. McCoy soon after the divorce entered the space service.
McCoy’s divorce never made it to screens in the ’60s, but the 2009 JJ Trek used the idea when McCoy explains to Kirk that he enrolled in Starfleet following a bitter breakup.
Fontana’s story outline had Joanna and Kirk developing a relationship — “In the course of the story, Kirk will find himself drawn to Joanna, and she is (naturally) attracted to him” — and McCoy getting overly protective of her, causing tension between the friends. Joanna, as the episode was to be called, was never produced and — somehow — the idea morphed into The Way to Eden, with Chekov’s old girlfriend Irina Galliulin replacing Joanna.
DeForest Kelley also told Berman that his favourite episodes to that point included The City on the Edge of Forever, Metamorphosis, Miri and Tomorrow is Yesterday.
Production stress
Kelley was also open about the taxing nature of television production:
It’s very tiring. It’s rewarding in many ways, but it’s an exhausting routine. Matter of fact, we’ll all kind of run-down.” He looked ruefully at his cigarette. “Probably smoke too much. I know that Bill is weary, and Leonard, and so am I. The pace kind of catches up with you, but then a week goes by, and you kind of get your second wind. I can’t help but believe this is a more difficult show to do than, let’s say, a western or a Dragnet or something of that nature. We’re vitally concerned, all three of us are, with this show, the scripts — even after we get the script we’re concerned. It may reflect sometimes as an antagonism, but it isn’t antagonism, it’s simply wanting it to be right, and as a result we sometimes have to have a few fights, you know, to get it that way.
From TrekCore Berman then suggests to Kelley one example of wanting to get it right, from The City on the Edge of Forever:
McCoy is coming out from under the influence of a drug but he’s still groggy. In the script, he falls asleep saying to a girl ‘Quite all right, I don’t believe in you either.’ But the way it came out was, ‘Quite all right, my dear, I don’t believe in you either.’ Which sort of captured his gentleness and gallantry.
That’s a subtle but important bit of characterization, and those small production details, told by the people on the set in the ’60s, make this newsletter so important.
Inside Star Trek is an invaluable source of early Star Trek voices. I’ll cover each issue.
Click here to read other articles in this series. -
Thank you, Doug Drexler, for trying to save the Gold Key comics
Doug Drexler tells a great story about the Gold Key Star Trek comics. The man who would go on to become a noted makeup artist, scenic artist, illustrator, and visual effects expert on TNG, Voyager, DS9, Enterprise and five Trek films was working at the Federation Trading Post in the mid-70s. The New York store was a mecca for Trekkies in the early days of fandom. It printed its own posters, made uniforms, and sold outfits to Saturday Night Live for its Star Trek spoof.
Drexler talked about Gold Key on The Inglorious Treksperts podcast:
The Gold Key guys came strutting in one day. They were only across the street from us, and they were coming in to be big shots. About a half hour before they came in, we were using them as an example of how wrong [Star Trek products] could go. So they came in and said, “We do the Gold Key comics!” and we burst out laughing. We couldn’t help it. We told them, as gently as we could, what was wrong with their comics.
Gold Key published 61 Star Trek comics between 1967 and 1979, although a few were reprints. They are highly prized now for their kitsch value but, as Drexler said, there was a lot wrong with the books. The plots were silly, the characters were nothing like what we saw on TV, and the details were always incorrect; flames squirted from the shuttle deck and the nacelles, the look of the bridge and the transporter room were just made up, Scotty was often drawn as a tall blond guy, and his name was misspelled as Slott on the cover of issue 55. It is said that the two artists who drew the early issues both lived in Italy and had never seen the show.
Back in the ‘70s, though, there was almost no Star Trek merchandise, so the comics were popular, and collecting comics is a lot of fun. I was actually sorry when I completed my collection.
I have always been interested in the story behind these books, so I was pleased when well-known comic writer Len Wein was scheduled to appear in Toronto for a convention in 2009. Wein wrote eight issues for Gold Key and I could finally ask someone about those days. I had him autograph The Legacy of Lazarus (#9) and The Enterprise Mutiny (#14).
Sadly, though, he didn’t have a lot to say about his time at Gold Key. Perhaps he didn’t enjoy those years; he went on to bigger things, including co-creating Swamp Thing at DC and reviving the X-Men franchise at Marvel. I walked away from his table not knowing any more than when I arrived.
Wein died in 2017 and, while Swamp Thing is definitely the height of his career, his Star Trek work wasn’t bad. Issue 9 is about a planet full of androids made in the images of Earth celebrities, and 14 is a good story about a Klingon plot to replace Kirk with a lookalike operative. A clever Spock foils the plot, but the end is marred slightly by a repeat of the scene in Whom Gods Destroy in which Spock is holding a phaser on two identical Kirks. The obvious solution is to stun them both but, as in the episode, Spock guesses which is real and shoots the other one.
A few years after Wein’s work, Drexler’s criticism caused the Gold Key guys to basically say “Oh yea, you think you can do better?” And yes, he did. Drexler wrote down some ideas and ended up with a story consultant credit on two issues.
This Tree Bears Bitter Fruit, #47, is an interesting story about energy beings who destroy matter for food. There is a mysterious old man who controls the beings, but his plot line is dropped following a convoluted fight between Kirk and the energy beings. It doesn’t make a lot of sense but it doesn’t really have to. It’s fun. And the artwork and characterization are far more accurate than in the early days. There are also nice callbacks to the Organians and The Lights of Zetar, and a recreation of the salad scene from The Corbomite Maneuver. Those came from Drexler.
But even he could only do so much: Scotty is shown seated at the transporter console, a surprised Kirk exclaims “Great galaxies!” and the tricorders are huge and bright pink.
Issue 48, Murder on the Enterprise, is a fairly standard whodunit but it’s entertaining. Drexler salts the story liberally with references for fans. Kirk mentions his time as a lieutenant on the Farragut (Obsession), Spock says a scientist made his reputation studying the silicone-based life on Janus IV (The Devil in the Dark), one person is “hungry as a sehlat” (Journey to Babel and Yesteryear) and there is even a quick mention of the halo fish seen in the animated episode The Terratin Incident.
Although he only worked directly on two issues, Drexler’s involvement greatly improved what followed. Before him, issue 46 opens with the crew dreading the jump to warp drive, as traveling faster than light is a “wrenching, dizzying, blinding” experience that Scott describes as entering “the mouth of hell.” This is laughably inconsistent with the TV show.
After Drexler’s involvement, the comics looked and sounded more like Star Trek, with accurate artwork and less outlandish stories. Issue 49, for example, is a mostly thoughtful sequel to Metamorphosis which even includes a recap of the episode. Again, Drexler’s influence didn’t fix everything: for some reason, Zefram Cochrane is drawn as an older man with theatrically swept-back hair.
The Gold Key comics were never great Star Trek, but they got markedly better after Doug Drexler worked with the publishers. For that, Doug, Trek fans thank you.
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The Horror at 37,000 Feet is all you need to know about early ’70s Shatner
The Encyclopedia Shatnerica has this to say about the 1973 made-for-TV movie The Horror at 37,000 Feet: “The hackneyed plot concerns a jumbo jet, and especially those passengers in first class, which is being haunted by ghosts because of a druid stone in the baggage hold.”
This cinematic gem also features flight attendants wearing ridiculous helmets, a dog you just know is doomed, and an impressive B-list cast that included one past and one future Star Trek star. It also illustrates what William Shatner went through after he left the bridge of the Enterprise.
I have this movie on an old VHS tape in a box somewhere, but luckily it is also available on YouTube in a good transfer.
Shatner plays an alcoholic ex-priest whose character is defined early on with the world-weary line, “I’ll tell you something: I’m bored with rules.” He is meant to give the movie some gravitas; a defrocked priest, after all, should have insight into the supernatural goings-on that soon terrorize the passengers. Unfortunately, his wisdom is delivered in lines like “The closer to heaven, the more discordant,” which doesn’t make much sense even in the story’s context.
Only a few years after guest-starring in Elaan of Troyius, France Nuyen boards the cursed airplane in a small-to-vanishing role. She plays a model who briefly serves as a love interest for one of the male leads; unfortunately, the subplot is dropped as soon as it appears and she is relegated to standing in the background of scenes.
Paul Winfield, Captain Clark Terrell in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, is almost unrecognizable playing a fussy British doctor. He too gets little to do.
The cast also includes Buddy Ebsen (The Beverly Hillbillies’ Jed Clampett) and Russell Johnson (the Professor from Gilligan’s Island).
It is not a good movie. The plot doesn’t make sense, the acting is stilted and it is only sporadically even a little scary. A few years before both Jaws and Alien created terror by keeping the monster hidden for most of the movie, Horror tries for the same effect but ultimately disappoints when no big bad ever bursts on to the screen.
But watch the movie anyway. It’s one of those so-bad-it’s-good films that are a lot of fun to watch. And it is indicative of the career struggles Shatner faced after Star Trek.
The Shatner of the ’70s
The decade between the end of TOS and the release of The Motion Picture in 1979 were largely unproductive years for Shatner; he lived for a while in the back of a truck camper, made movies like Horror and appeared in a lot of small plays. As he wrote in his autobiography Up Till Now, “After my divorce from Gloria (in 1969) I was just about broke…and I began looking for work. I had three kids and an ex-wife to support.”
So he took any gig that paid, and the result was a lot of mediocre work that would have been entirely forgotten had Shatner not become a cultural icon. His climb back to prominence began with the best movie of this period, The Kingdom of the Spiders, which hit theatres just two years before The Motion Picture, but even it would have faded into the shadows without the reflected light of Star Trek.
Shatner has often said that his success comes largely from his willingness to say yes when asked if he wants to do something. As he wrote in Shatner Rules:
I nearly always say “yes.” “Yes” means opportunity. “Yes” makes the dots in your life appear. And if you’re willing and open, you can connect these dots. You don’t know where these dots are going to lead, and if you don’t invest yourself fully, the dots won’t connect. The lines you make with those dots always lead to interesting places. “No” closes doors. “Yes” kicks them wide open… As long as you’re able to say “yes,” the opportunities keep coming, and with them, the adventures.
Those opportunities led Shatner through The Horror at 37,000 Feet and to a set crawling with 5,000 tarantulas and eventually to three Emmy Awards for Boston Legal, the Shatner Claus Christmas album and a thousand other projects. Catch one of those early dots with Horror on YouTube. -
33 stickers that take you back to Star Trek collecting in the ’70s
You have likely never seen this licensed Star Trek kids’ booklet. It was made in Canada and the only one I have ever seen in person is the one I own. I’ve added a PDF download link below so you can have your own copy.
The booklet was published in 1975 by Morris National Sales of Montreal, Quebec. It told an original story and came with numbered stickers to place in numbered spots. The images are from different episodes, plus there are a couple of illustrations.
Morris produced 33 stickers on sheets with three or four stickers each. The sheets were sold glued to a cover. Each cover was a puzzle piece; assembled, they formed the image of the Enterprise seen on page 4 of the book. Once you completed the puzzle, you could send the pieces off to Morris to receive “a full color poster of that scene.”
Complete the puzzle… 
…get this poster.
The book opens with overviews of the main crew and the Enterprise, and this section is surprisingly well written. The author even got Kirk’s serial number right, SC 937-0176 CEC, as seen in Court Martial. However, the entry on McCoy includes this weird note: “His personality quirks are famous among the crew who think him a bit odd.”
The Siege
The story, called The Siege, has a landing party beaming down to investigate the remnants of a city. The part that goes with sticker 6 says the group is Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Chekov, but the image is actually a scene from Arena in which Chekov does not appear; the red shirt in the episode is Ensign O’Herlihy.
The story then takes a hard turn when Kirk begins to hallucinate that he is battling a “power-mad psychotic starship commander” (using photos of Kirk and Gary Mitchell from Where No Man Has Gone Before) and then a “grotesque reptilian creature,” the gorn from Arena.
McCoy tackles Kirk, and Spock instructs him to use his belt to tie the captain, which is a strange order until you realize it matched up with Kirk’s hallucination and allowed them to use a photo from The Cloud Minders.
Back aboard the Enterprise, Kirk is sedated in sickbay and McCoy and Spock determine the crew is under attack by aliens feeding on their thoughts or emotions or memories. Spock begins hallucinating that he’s back on Vulcan, but he recovers (somehow) and then Kirk escapes sickbay (somehow).
Here again we see some cleverness: for the story, Spock needs to chase down Kirk and hold a phaser on him. Where does he find the captain? In the shuttlebay, which allows them to use the publicity photo of Spock standing in front of the Galileo.
And what does Spock do with the phaser? He “fired a lethal disrupt beam at full charge, into Jim Kirk.” Like, the actual Kirk. The captain. Spock reasoned that the alien field influencing Kirk would absorb the phaser energy. We are all fortunate that he was correct.
But the story ends on a real down note. When Spock cut the shields (in order to disrupt the alien’s hold on the Enterprise crew — or something, it’s really not clear), “The enormous amount of energy built up to counteract the deflectors was then snapped back to its source in an awesome backlash,” causing an explosion that left the alien settlement “shattered and trembling.” In other words, Spock killed an unknown number of beings on the planet and no one comments or beams down to see if anyone survived. It’s a scene reminiscent of Kirk’s casual genocide in the novel Mission to Horatius, and again it takes place in a story meant for children.
’70s collectibles were different
Here’s the thing: it’s easy to make fun of items like this, and yes, the story is entirely silly, but remember, many collectibles were created for kids, and it would have been a lot of fun to paste the stickers into the boxes, creating a picture book as you went.
And remember too that in 1975 the pictures themselves were collectibles. The first Fotonovel was still two years away, the episodes weren’t available on VHS until the ’80s, and dealers covered tables with 8x10s at conventions — because people wanted Star Trek photos.
Today we buy screen-accurate props and costumes and high-end models from Master Replicas and Eaglemoss; we expect a lot from our collectibles. In the ’70s, we were thrilled just to see an item with Star Trek on it. We were very forgiving.
One of the centre posters These books sometimes appear on eBay, and the sellers usually want a lot for them. If you decide to add one to your collection, know that they came in four editions, all the same but with different posters in the middle: Spock, Kirk, Kirk and the Gorn, and the Robot. I only own the Spock edition, and that’s okay with me. I like this item, but one is enough.
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Inside Star Trek issue 2: two days to make Spock’s ears, 90 minutes to get Nimoy into them
Inside Star Trek was a semi-official newsletter, published under the guidance of Gene Roddenberry. This connection gave the writers access to the actors, production crew and sets.
I own the complete run:
Issues 1 to 12: Inside Star Trek, edited by Ruth Berman
Issues 13 to 24: renamed Star Trektennial News, edited by Susan Sackett
Issues 25 to 31: again called Inside Star Trek, edited by Virginia Yable
Here are highlights from issue 2, published August 1968.
Cover by the amazing Greg Jein
The cover drawing of the Klingon D7 is by accomplished model maker Greg Jein. He drew it in 1968, and by 1977 he was hired to construct an updated variant of the D7 for Star Trek: Phase II. Two years after that, he created the V’ger interior models for Star Trek: The Motion Picture on a very tight schedule. He told Cinefex magazine: “We called people all over town. There were probably close to twenty or thirty of us working on it, on and off. At least four weekends we didn’t go home at all. When it finally came out, we were still two or three days late.” (Issue 2.)
Jein also worked on the two- and six-foot studio models of the Enterprise-D for Encounter at Farpoint and built other pieces for that episode, and contributed to other TNG episodes plus DS9, Voyager and many of the movies.
Jein is responsible for or contributed to 51 Star Trek models, but his first Trek product was this newsletter cover.
From Oz to Spock’s ears
Fred Phillips was already an accomplished make-up artist when he landed on the Enterprise. Asked by editor Ruth Berman about his career, he paused in a list of productions to ask “…what was that fantasy with Bert Lahr?” She replied “The Wizard of Oz?”
When working on Oz sort of slips your mind, you’ve done a lot of important work. He added “The Wizard of Oz is actually where I got the training I’ve been able to execute on Outer Limits and this show.”
Berman asked about creating the Vulcan and Romulan ears:
I have to take an impression of the actor’s ears. It takes between 20 and 30 hours to make a pair of ears. I would normally need two days to get the ears ready, from impression to finished appliance. After you have the molds done, you pour the rubber in — and the room temperature and the temperature of all the ingredients have to be inside a range of 65 to 71 degrees. Then it takes four hours cooking in the oven and three hours cooling. Usually what I do is put the molds in the oven when I get home from work around eight, and then I can take them out around midnight. You could take them out sooner but then the molds would crack.”
Phillips at work for Amok Time Berman asked if appliances are ever reused, and Phillips recounted a story I believe appears in print only here. “They had wanted a custom-built head for the aliens in the show we’re doing this week, The Empath — but there just wasn’t time. I was able to substitute with a head that came from the pilot to Outer Limits.” There was only one alien in The Outer Limits pilot The Galaxy Being, but there are two Vians in The Empath, so that detail is unclear.
Image from parlor of horror
Image from TrekCore Phillips said getting Leonard Nimoy ready for the cameras usually took 90 minutes. Some characters took much longer. He showed Berman his sketch of the Gorgan from And the Children Shall Lead: “Now that one took a long time. It was for Melvin Belli. It looks like a mask, but it actually isn’t because the face has to be able to move freely.”
Phillips’ Gorgan sketch 
The screen version (TrekCore) It’s an interesting story about a really poor episode, but at least lawyer Melvin Belli enjoyed his time on set. He told Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman in the book Captains’ Logs, “The most fun for me personally was my ‘melting’ death scene. Even though they had taken casts of my face much earlier, the makeup required for the scene still took the better part of the morning. They would shoot for a time, pause, then take me back to makeup to make me look more hideous.”
Inside Star Trek is an invaluable source of early Star Trek voices. I’ll cover each issue. -
Kirk and Spock were meant to bust out of your wall. I got my poster signed instead
When you got a Super Hero Wallbusters poster, you were supposed to cut out the figures, paste them on your wall, and then write something clever in the word balloons. When I got mine, I stored it in a poster tube, got Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner to sign it, and then paid a lot of money to get it framed.
I’ve been collecting for a long time, and it’s rare to find something I have never seen. Don’t want, already have or can’t afford — sure. But entirely new to me? Not often.
I was walking the dealer room at Toronto Trek in 2006. Nimoy and Shatner were scheduled for the Fan Expo convention that fall, so I was looking for something to get signed. I spotted this big poster (90 x 120 cm, 3 x 4 feet) from across that crowded room. I had never seen one before.
The dealer had found two in storage; he had forgotten about them. (See? Go through your old stuff; you never know what you’ll find.) He was asking $50 and surprised me by throwing in a Star Trek V juice carton, which is now one of the oddest items in my collection. The next day I dropped by his booth and he asked if I would have paid more for the poster. I said yes, so the person who got his last one paid $75. Sorry about that.
The poster is copyrighted 1977. The manufacturer, Western Graphics Corporation, was bought sometime after by Mead Corporation and then by Rose Art Industries and seems to be no longer. The company also produced Spider-Man, Evel Knievel and Wonder Woman Wallbusters, and that’s all I know about it or its products.
I wish I had a great signing story, but this was one of those cons when Shatner and Nimoy had a huge line so they just signed with their heads down. I had hoped the unusual item would get them to look up and inquire about it. No luck. I also got the American Cancer Society anti-smoking poster autographed at that con, with the same lack of personal contact. As I said, lots of people to get through.
But it is still one of my favourite pieces, because it’s a fun likeness, I have not seen another since, and it’s big and looks great on my wall. Also, it got me that weird juice-carton collectible.
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Inside Star Trek issue 1: selling IDIC and dumpster diving for set pieces
Inside Star Trek was a semi-official newsletter, launched in 1968 under the guidance of Gene Roddenberry. The staff had access to the actors, production crew and sets.
I own the complete run:
Issues 1 to 12: Inside Star Trek, edited by Ruth Berman
Issues 13 to 24: renamed Star Trektennial News, edited by Susan Sackett
Issues 25 to 31: again called Inside Star Trek, edited by Virginia Yable
Here are highlights from issue 1, published July 1968.
Day one set visit
The inaugural issue opens with a description guaranteed to make any fan jealous: “First week of filming on the third season of Star Trek: dust covers are pulled off the bridge…between ‘takes’ mammoth electric fans fight the early summer heat…the warning bell sounds, the fans are shut off, and powerful arc lights shine down on the sets.”
Editor Ruth Berman was on set for the filming of The Last Gunfight, later renamed Spectre of the Gun. Surprisingly, after a few paragraphs describing the shooting stage and the many technicians present, Burman ends the article without giving us more from the set.
Selling IDIC
Gene Roddenberry created the Vulcan pendant Spock wore in Is There in Truth No Beauty? because he wanted to sell it to fans. It was a commercial, rather than a creative, decision. Leonard Nimoy wrote in I am Spock:
The term (IDIC) stands for Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations…and I was all in favor of the philosophy…but not the fact that Gene wanted me to wear the medallion because he wanted to sell them through his mail-order business Lincoln Enterprises.
Nimoy and William Shatner even staged a short walk-out protest during filming, but eventually Roddenberry got his way.
Berman and Roddenberry then printed a made-up story in the fanzine to push medallion sales. “When Gene Roddenberry…wants to give a friend a special present, it sometimes turns out to be a hand-crafted piece of jewelery. In the case of Leonard Nimoy, Roddenberry decided that a pendant with a special Vulcan design would be the right gift.” To drive home the pitch, the newsletter asks “Would you like an idic of your own? If enough interest is shown, replicas of Leonard Nimoy’s idic will be added to our catalog.” News of that “special present” would have been a complete surprise to Nimoy.
Roddenberry first tried to get the pendant into Spock’s Brain. From a Roddenberry memo to producer Fred Freiberger:
Dear Freddie:
Suggest that the Vulcan medallion can be handled in the epilogue of “SPOCK’S BRAIN” in the following manner:
Epilogue opens with Uhura (and possible appropriate others) making a presentation to Spock of a boxed item from the junior officers of the vessel, which they have had made up to show their delight that Spock has been brought back to life.
Chekov is proud that his research on it was correct and Spock admits it is perfectly executed… Prompted by the fact that Chekov’s clever research has already revealed much about it, Spock begins to explain some of the symbology. Spock, genuinely moved by the gift and by certain relationships of it to the story we have just seen, becomes more and more articulate and is finally chattering away like a human.
We can have some humor here as Kirk, McCoy and Scotty try to break in with ship’s business, and for the first time in our series, Spock won’t let anyone get a word in edgewise. This leads to your suggested final line of McCoy’s wishing he had not connected Spock’s mouth.
Spock’s long exposition was meant to entice buyers, but the memo was sent July 10, 1968, mid-way through filming, and it was too late to add this scene. This explains why the IDIC appeared in Is There in Truth No Beauty? as it filmed directly after Spock’s Brain.
On Kirk’s bed with the set decorator
DC Fontana, from TrekCore D.C. Fontana interviewed set decorator John Dwyer while the two were “seated comfortably on Captains Kirk’s bed on stage 9,” but despite the cozy setting the article is fairly dry. This is surprising considering Fontana is a writer and Dwyer must have had a hundred great stories. The piece’s best bit is about scavenging in the garbage for set pieces:
We do a lot of our wall decorations from the trash bins around the lot. We look in every one as we go by, and in maybe every fifth one we find something appealing that is being thrown away. So we take it, repaint it or add things to it, and use it… We can’t go out and have things built, because the cost factor is just prohibitive.
Pitch to journalists: be fair
On June 22, 1968, Gene Roddenberry addressed a lunch crowd of entertainment journalists. He was joined by the entire main cast plus Majel Barrett, third-season producer Fred Freiberger, co-producer Bob Justman and costume designer Bill Theiss. Roddenberry’s extolled the virtues of his show, saying:
We are proud that this is the only television program today saying to a worried world that there is a tomorrow. More, we are saying that tomorrow need not be computerized and de-humanized. It is within our ability to make tomorrow a more richly rewarding existence than yesterday ever was.
He also asks the audience to treat the show fairly:
Like us or not, give us rave reviews or rip us apart — do us the favor of accepting that we work just as you do. Within our own limitations, and within the limitations of our medium, when we put our name on the final product it is the best we have been able to do at that time. Bad or good, and it will most probably be both, you may be certain that we make our show with pride.
Shatner has always been busy
From
SHAKESPEARE ARCHERYBerman asked William Shatner what he does outside of Star Trek. His list was extensive: hunting with a bow, getting a pilot’s licence, filming the movies The White Comanche and The Revolution of Antonio de Leon, recording The Transformed Man for Decca Records, appearing on game shows including You Don’t Say, and starring in the play The Hyphen. The strangest quote was about that game show: “I tried to be as funny as possible, because I knew I was a deadhead. Still, it was amusing, it was fun to play.”
Inside Star Trek is an invaluable source of early Star Trek voices. I’ll cover each issue.
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A View-Master surprise, with Star Trek’s worst episode
Ever find $20 in a jacket you haven’t worn for a while? That just happened to me, except it was Star Trek View-Master reels in a storage box.
I was looking for a specific collectible and found instead the Star Trek and The Motion Picture View-Master sets. And then I got another surprise: the second sleeve also contained the three Wrath of Khan discs. So I own three of the four original-series titles. The company also produced one set drawn from the animated series.
I have no recollection of buying these, so it was a fun moment. The only downside is that View-Master’s first Star Trek project was The Omega Glory, which I consider the nadir of TOS.
From TrekCore Gene Roddenberry wrote The Omega Glory. It was one of three scripts considered in 1965 for the second Trek pilot, but no one really liked it. Writing of that time, production exec Herb Solow said in Inside Star Trek, “Gene Roddenberry’s script, The Omega Glory, wasn’t very good. It was unnecessary to point it out to him; he was the first to recognize the fact. It later became a less-than-mediocre series episode.”
Roddenberry revised the script and the episode was filmed in December of 1967. Perhaps recognizing some weakness in it, he wanted extra promo money spent, according to Marc Cushman’s These are the Voyages, Season Two. He requested a full-page ad in the trade papers, suggested it could launch the third season, asked for some on-air promos, and tried to convince a Hollywood Reporter writer to cover it. All these were rejected.
Finally, Cushman writes, “Roddenberry struck a deal with GAF Corporation to release The Omega Glory as a View-Master 3-D disc set.” That would shine at least a small spotlight on the script. Other sources say that Omega just happened to be the episode filming when the GAF photographer showed up, but Cushman’s claim makes sense in the context.
The episode has its defenders. Dorothy Fontana said “I didn’t think it was our best episode. However, I always did like the speech that Kirk says about the ‘words’… ‘We the People’ was really a great speech and Bill delivered it well.”
Sure. And Cushman writes that its strong points include the performances from William Shatner and Morgan Woodward, the fight sequences and the production values. But even he has to acknowledge:
…one can’t help but squirm a bit when the tattered flag of the United States is paraded across our television screens to the accompaniment of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” For many, it all seemed rather self-glorifying for this U.S. made show.
The script employs Roddenberry’s parallel-worlds concept, which posits that other planets could experience a history similar to Earth’s. I wrote about the origins of that here. It’s a dubious idea but it saved money by allowing the use of standing sets and existing costumes in stories like Miri and Bread and Circuses. But in Omega, the premise is stretched to breaking. Another Gouverneur Morris writing those words in the Constitution, for another United States, word for word, in the same order, with “We the People…” at the top in the same larger calligraphy. It’s ridiculous.
From TrekCore Spock understates it when he says “The parallel is almost too close, Captain.”
Done in Miri to save money, we can accept a world and a city that looks similar to Earth. Done here, with the same document, country and flag, it comes across as jingoistic, and the value statement it makes about American culture is not consistent with the equality message in Arena, The Devil in the Dark and The Corbomite Maneuver.
I also dislike The Omega Glory because it shows a starship captain committing mass murder, and seemingly planning genocide if he can only get enough weapons. I want to believe in the people of the Federation; I have the same issue with historian John Gill in Patterns of Force.
But Spock’s Brain…
When people discuss the weakest TOS episodes, they fault The Alternative Factor or Spock’s Brain, but those are simply bad episodes. That’s inevitable in any series. Consider another unpopular episode: Plato’s Stepchildren. Yes, there is the cringe-inducing scene of Spock dancing near his captain’s head and Kirk neighing like a horse, but the philosophy of that episode is spot-on. Kirk tells Alexander: “…where I come from, size, shape, or color makes no difference…” That is a Star Trek message, but in The Omega Glory, it is the philosophy that’s wrong, and that makes it the worst of the series.
But there are two Omega bright spots. First, it was at the end of this episode that NBC announced the series would return for another season. Second, when Gene Coon was handed Roddenberry’s original 1965 script to rework, he was so unenthused by it that he instead wrote two original pieces: Errand of Mercy and The Devil in the Dark. So, in a backhanded way, The Omega Glory is responsible for two of the strongest episodes.
Back to View-Master
A fun story about the cover photo of the TOS envelope: the ship in the foreground is the original three-foot Enterprise model, and the Exeter in the background is an AMT model. The model worked in The Doomsday Machine and it works here.
After finding these discs, I bought an old View-Master viewer. Seeing these scenes in 3D is magical. One shot from Omega of Uhura and Sulu at her station makes you feel like you could walk right onto the bridge with them. And if you look closely, Nichelle Nichols appears to be studying a script open on her lap.
I also found these kids’ records, still sealed in plastic, two books from 1978 and 1977, and a lot of other stuff. So look through your storage boxes. You may have some forgotten Star Trek treasures.
PostscriptStar Trek: Insurrection is a retelling of The Omega Glory, but almost no one ever notices that.
Update: collection completed. Just after I wrote this, I acquired Mr. Spock’s Time Trek, which recounts the animated episode Yesteryear. I now have all four of the TOS sets; there is a TNG set but I only collect TOS.
Arena, Bread and Circuses, Enterprise, Errand of Mercy, Exeter, Gene Coon, Gene Roddenberry, Herb Solow, Insurrection, Marc Cushman, Miri, Nichelle Nichols, Spock’s Brain, Star Trek, Sulu, The Corbomite Maneuver, The Devil in the Dark, The Motion Picture, The Omega Glory, The Wrath of Khan, Uhura, View-Master, Yesteryear -
You don’t need to read Mission to Horatius
Mission to Horatius was the first original TOS novel published, which makes it an important piece of Star Trek memorabilia. But important isn’t the same as good. In fact, it’s really bad. Only completists need to own one.
The Enterprise is traveling to a distant star system to determine which of three inhabited planets sent out a distress call. That’s a fine story idea, but the plot, characterizations and dialogue are terrible. For example, the Enterprise has been in space a long time and the crew is suffering from a disorder called “space cafard” which can be deadly and can (somehow) cause the crew to mutiny. Also, the book paints a very bleak picture of serving on our beloved 1701.
Oh, and Kirk commits genocide and no one notices or comments.
Spoilers
Plot spoilers follow, but that’s not a problem because, again, you should not read Mission to Horatius.
Space cafard is ridiculous. Cafard is striking some crew members. Spock helpfully defines the malady: “The instinctive fear of deep space. A mania that is evidently highly contagious. It is said in the early days of space travel, cafard could sweep through a ship in a matter of hours, until all on board were raging maniacs.”
Raging maniacs. Right. McCoy then informs the captain that only last year, the Space Scout Westmoreland was found drifting with the whole crew dead. “They had killed each other, Captain. Evidently in their madness.”
“They tore each other apart with their bare hands…” Spock adds. People get stressed at work, even burned out, but suggesting the majority of Enterprise’s crew would kill each other because they’re tired is simply silly.
Sulu keeps a rat in his shirt. While on bridge duty. “Sulu cleared his throat again and reached a hand up under his uniform tunic. He brought forth a small brown animal. He set it down on the console before him and said apologetically, ‘Mickey, sir.’”
Captain Kirk stared. “Where did that come from, and what is it doing on my bridge?”
Excellent questions. But there is one good bit here. Kirk berates Sulu with “I thought you were clear on the orders against pets aboard the Enterprise since our troubles with the tribbles.” The show rarely referenced previous events, and it’s welcome here.
Serving on the Enterprise sucks. I would jump at the chance to beam aboard the Enterprise. So would you. But don’t do it, because apparently it’s terrible there.
Chekov snorted. “You don’t kill time on the Enterprise these days. It dies a slow death from boredom.”
Ensign Freeman looked distastefully about the wardroom. “You know…I sometimes get the feeling I’ve spent my whole life on this confounded ship. And to think I used to believe I liked the Starfleet service.”
They shoot people. Spock says General Order One “restrains us from using our sophisticated weapons against advanced life forms…” Two minutes later, Kirk orders Chekov to fire on an inhabitant of the planet Neolithia who is fleeing from the crew on a “horselike quadruped.” There is no reason for this, and sending a person falling unconscious from a running animal is a dangerous assault.
Mythra should not be stoned. Mythra, the second planet the Enterprise visits, was settled by “religious dissidents” who want to worship in peace, but the priest class uses daily doses of LSD to control the citizens. The landing party is handed drugged drinks but no one is dumb enough to partake — except Chekov, who then spends some hours happily stoned. The scene is reminiscent of Darnell taking a bite of the borgia plant in The Man Trap, except Darnell didn’t do that because Enterprise officers aren’t dumb.
Kirk orders the settlement’s water supply laced with an antidote, removing the control of the priest class. The Enterprise then warps away, without waiting to see what ignoring the Prime Directive will create. Granted, that is exactly what Kirk does in The Apple, so I may have to give the book a pass here.
Then Kirk commits genocide. The third planet, called Bavarya, was settled by “political malcontents” who claim to be descendants of “the elite of Teutonic peoples.” (Bavarya. Bavaria. Get it?) And then some Nazi references kick in. For example: “We are the Herr-Elite of the Horatian system, and it is our destiny to help these backward worlds.”
We learn that the Herr-Elite are real people, while the vast majority of the population — five million people — are clones who operate as servants, workers and soldiers.
McCoy says clones have no soul, because the “spark” within a person cannot be duplicated, and that clones are built on a “matrix — a mold or impression. Wipe clean the matrix and the duplicate simply [reverts] to the molecules of which it was composed.”
It is never explained how one can remotely erase the mold or why this causes people to disintegrate, but they soon find a machine that will “wipe clean the matrix.” Kirk orders Scotty to throw the switch — and all the duplicates are killed. Five million of them. Sure, they are copies, but they are clearly sentient, so Kirk just committed genocide. But no one seems concerned.
“Your orders are to get that rat!” Planetary crises all solved, 40 crewmembers are now in stasis because of cafard, and McCoy says half the crew are showing signs. “One cafard-crazed crewman running berserk through the ship and the mental contagion will spread like a forest fire, Jim. The whole ship could fall apart within the hour.” Again, it is not explained how bored and tired people infect others with madness.
Remember the rat? It escaped and has been spotted “dancing” in the hallway, which Sulu says means it is infected with plague. Fear of the Black Death grips the Enterprise but a search fails to locate the rat, so the entire crew dons spacesuits and the ship is flooded with chlorine gas.
But don’t worry: McCoy taught the rat to dance to make everyone think they would die of the plague. It was a diversion. The book ends with the Enterprise approaching a starbase for some cafard-curing shore leave.
Mission to Horatius was published by the company that also produced the Gold Key Star Trek comics, and it shows the same lack of believability and almost total unfamiliarity with the source characters, setting or spirit. Early Star Trek novels, such as James Blish’s uneven Spock Must Die!, can be forgiven for not getting characters and dialogue quite right. After all, Spock grins in Where No Man Has Gone Before. But Mission to Horatius is not even close. And yes, it was marketed as a youth novel, but that fact makes its genocide and casual violence more egregious, not less.
Collectors of early TOS memorabilia should probably own this novel, because of its place in history, but no one should actually read it.
Mission to Horatius was written by Mack Reynolds, illustrations by Sparky Moore, and published by Whitman Publishing. First edition: 1968.
Collecting Trek
A TOS collection 40 years in the making
Collecting Trek 